10 Government Hacks — Slides From a Talk at OSCON 2006 [[ Hack 2 >>

This is a Movie about Internet Governance. Actually, "movie" implies a large number of people creating 120 minutes of full-motion video, so moviette or video blog might be more appropriate. And, there's no such thing as "Internet Governance," since by definition nobody can govern an Internet, so perhaps it is about the Internet and governance and other topics. Rather than further mangle the metaphor, here is a mix-minus version of my own personal inconvenient truth, an annotated set of presentation materials presented as "10 Government Hacks."

Hack 1 is "Be Media." Often, if you want to record audio or video or even just get in the door to some official function, you have to present your bona fides ahead of time. The trick to this hack is that they will always say no and you have to just keep asking until they realize you won't go away.

I've long had an interest in Internet [and] Governance, so when I heard the United Nations was throwing a big party called WSIS on the topic, I figured I'd go see how the pros did it. I'm not really a journalist, but I've played one on the Internet, so I got O'Reilly & Associates to name me their international tech reporter and applied for credentials. O'Reilly didn't make the cut as "bona fide media," so I reapplied as a stringer for the second-largest English-language newspaper in Bangkok.

I made it to Tunisia and covered the summit. It was not a pretty picture, as I reported for the Bangkok Post. A few months later, I was invited to give a talk on 10 ways to hack government at O'Reilly's OSCON conference, so I brought some footage of Tunisia with me to illustrate this hack, the moral of which was that they could easily have cancelled the whole summit and just given Nick the money to buy some laptops.

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